'Twas ever thus

Some things never change, as this cartoon attests from 25 years ago.

But I must report firsthand that not everyone acts like this. Folks in the Central Coast — Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties in particular — regard water as precious cargo.

A waitress told us her restaurant could be fined for giving us water without our asking first.

A small public park included a new sign, proudly proclaiming the city's intent to let the lawn die.

Raised eyebrows are tamped back down with prominent signs indicating this or that particular patch of healthy greenery is sustained with recycled "gray" water.

Spare, native landscaping is much more prevalent there, and the sense of conservation is palpable. They acknowledge what too many others do not, that California is a Mediterranean climate.

Lesson learned.

Or is it?

Don't get around much anymore

What began as this blog's first-ever movie review (!) has morphed into a total-experience review, wrapped around a movie and made complete with a trip (and several falls) down memory lane.

From the last time I entered a contest: A local humor publication inaugurated a
competition. Thinking I had a good shot, and riffing off Madonna's silly expensive
coffee-table book from the time, I entered this. The award went to the professional
cartoonist in town who entered, and I wrote the editor, pissed off about that.
The editor was one of the panelists last night. It's been 23 years but I'm over it.
Really I am.

Oh, and the merest possible excuse to run an old editorial cartoon, which has nothing to do with anything except it's a cartoon.

It takes a lot these days to get me into downtown Sacramento, especially at night. Too much meh going around these days.

The occasion drawing me out of the house last night was "Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy," a French documentary showcasing the work, trials and passions of cartoon satirists from around the world.

Plus, Sacramento Bee editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman was going to be there for a panel discussion, and it was a chance to meet him. After I had complimented him on some work a while back, he unexpectedly invited me to lunch, but we could never get on track. After a while it felt like I was stalking him — "Look! You promised lunch!" — so I dropped it.

(Note to Bob: I tried, man. I really tried.)

The Sacramento French Film Festival hosted the screening in response to the Paris shootings early this month in which staff and veteran cartoonists of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo were killed. The shooters, who died later after taking hostages, said they had done so to avenge offense Charlie cartoonists had committed to Muslims and the Prophet Muhammad.

Though the documentary by Stéphanie Valloatto does not include Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and was finished before the shootings, it captures the palpable tension cartoonists face across the world, and the courage with which they persist.

"Cartoonists" yesterday received a nomination as top documentary for the César Award, the French Oscar.

Hopscotching around the world, the film features cartoonists in Russia, China, Venezuela, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, Palestine, the Ivory Coast and Mexico. The United States is represented by Jeff Danziger, a syndicated cartoonist — one of the nation's most acerbic — who doesn't work for a newspaper. More on that later.

Jean Plantureux, a French cartoonist for Le Monde, serves as the thread running through the documentary. Plantu, as he's called, created Cartooning for Peace, a kind of Doctors Without Borders, except with ink-stained wretches. In the movie he travels to Israel, where the Israeli cartoonist, Michel Kichka, and Palestinian satirist, Baha Boukhari, are friends united in their fight against armed conflict and universal hypocrisy.

"Cartoonists" also introduces viewers briefly to Ali Farzat, a Syrian cartoonist, now in exile, whose hands were broken in 2011 by Syrian security forces for satirizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad … Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist infamous for depicting Muhammad with a bomb in a turban and igniting violent protests and persistent debate about free speech … and Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and activist whose work critical of government corruption has banned him from being able to leave his country.

OK, one more cartoon. Strike while the rare opportunity arises, right?

How was the movie? As a survey of editorial cartooning and satire worldwide, it's instructive for bursting our bubble that cartooning is only a U.S. or Western medium. Some of the cartoonists featured face constant surveillance, ostracism and death threats. Damien Glez reports news by publishing a cartoon-heavy paper in Burkina Faso for a largely illiterate population.

Too many cartoonists, though, spoiled the broth. The movie should have focused on three or four cartoonists — I was most intrigued by Rayma Suprani of Venezuela, one of too few women cartoonists, who describes the daily oppression of life under presidents Hugo Chåvez and now Nicolås Maduro; and Pi San, an animator whose political cartoons use the Internet to spread word of corrupt practices.

But just as I thought the movie would focus on one cartoonist's approach to a controversial issue, another cartoonist was introduced. Then another, then another. OK, maybe now they'll show the fallout of a particular cartoon and — no, here's another cartoonist.

Watch it on your friendly neighborhood streaming service. And learn French: Though it's subtitled, the text is white and so, it turns out, is the paper the cartoonists use. Too often when a cartoonist made a salient point, it was lost in white letters on a white background as the director showed the cartoonist's work.

Lost to this arrogant imperialist monolingualist, anyway. Maybe the director was sticking it to me.

I'm glad I went, though. The Crest Theatre, a movie palace from another age, just a skinny city block over from the state capitol building, still looks as good as the day nearly 20 years ago when I was minister-for-a-day and presided over the wedding of graphic designers Paul and Julie. The theater is still cuckoo for rococo —great gold-painted plaster torches, uplit in fierce orange and yellow, along the walls, recessed ceiling spaces high overhead, lit in blue above vast gold friezes, like sapphire pools suspended upside down.

And great acoustics! I could easily hear a woodworking, bluegrass banjo playing, horse-hoof clipping, globetrotting man (he told quite the nonstop story!) translate "Je Suis Charlie," which blazed big on the movie screen before the show started, for his date. I couldn't tell if his date was being coy, overthinking it or had just come from under a rock. "I'd like to learn a language," she said.

And I got to meet Jack Ohman. He didn't recognize my name, not that I expected him too. It was late, everyone was tired, and I was following a man who had buttonholed Ohman to draw cartoons exposing the Kennedy assassination coverup ("It's all bullshit," said Ohman, apparently a student of the assassination. "There's no credible evidence."). He was gracious but the energy for a quick visit was gone. And so it went, as it has gone for just about any person of note whom I'd like to meet. It's what I get for being polite.

Ohman was not optimistic for the future of the pen. He is president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, which numbers 50 nationwide. When he started 37 years ago, the United States had more than 250 full-time cartoonists. Editorial cartoonists, he told the audience, are only as good as their editors are brave. Danziger no longer draws for a newspaper.

It was telling that Danziger, the lone American cartoonist in the documentary, said he was too afraid to put his name to one work that went unpublished. It was on par with the salacious work French cartoonists produce regularly. Titled, "Cheney, Dick," it showed a naked former vice president from the back, holding a used condom over a toilet bowl. The condom bears the likeness of George W. Bush.

Robert Salladay, editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, told the crowd he was more optimistic about holding power accountable, though he cautioned that even though the Internet has spread the message, the message itself is getting atomized to smaller and smaller audiences. His center relies on massive donations to do its work.

People have every right to offend and be offended, Salladay said, but no right to violence and murder for their offense. When it happens, all debate must cease, and satirists should redouble their efforts to skewer.

Cartoonist Plantu said the satirists' greatest fear is the people's fear. A people afraid, he said, will not be brave enough to accept the truth and do something about it.

To pay Paul

Blessed and cursed, editorial cartoonists are forever trying to harness one issue/event/person/color as metaphor for whatever issue/event/person/color they're skewering. Bonus if the two collide. So to speak.

Twenty-five years ago, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Prince William Sound in Alaska, spilling nearly 11 million gallons of oil, killing wildlife on a massive scale, ruining a sensitive environment, and the fishing and tourism and general economy of the southern state. Despite valiant efforts to top it — even this weekend! — the Exxon Valdez spill remains one of the country's worst environmental disasters.

Twenty-five years ago, Rep. Tony Coelho, a rising star in the Democratic Party and a favorite to become House majority leader, faced intense scrutiny over the purchase of $100,000 in so-called high-yield "junk bonds" (all the rage at the time), and speculation that the purchase also bought Coelho's help for the savings and loan industry (which enraged us all at the time).

Coelho resigned from Congress and his post as party whip, though he was not charged with a crime. His district overlapped with some of The Stockton Record's readership.

Democrats in Congress had become less moored than usual from ethics and civic duty in 1989, and Coelho's troubles were just one manifestation.

What could I say about the spill itself that hadn't already been documented by then? (Bad oil! Bad! Bad!!) But I might have been able to use the terrible spill to bring light to issues voters might want to wonder about.

So nobly advanced

Seven score and eight years ago, the Union held, the great experiment in democracy carried on, turning on Abraham Lincoln's famous words to commemorate the national cemetery under construction at Gettysburg.

Then along came Willie Brown to turn democracy into a rigged game.

Not him alone, of course. You could say the system has been gamed from the get-go. Today U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, for example, leads his party in let's-filibuster-every-appointment-President-Obama-proposes-because-we-want-him-to-fail-at-every-step-and-serving-our-own-constituents-is-so-boring. Corrupt Democrats, reasoning rightly that their voters have forgotten they exist, take the under-the-table money and run, again, on their records.

Willie Brown, though, was the Grand Master.

He was Tip O'Neill "all politics is local" old school. He was good to San Francisco and The City loved him back, returning him many times to state office where his game board was set up to his deft maneuver.

The Assembly speaker learned from another Grand Master, former speaker and state treasurer Jesse Unruh who once said of lobbyists, "If you can't eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women and then vote against them, you have no business being up here."

Brown shook off almost every controversy that followed him. President Reagan had nothing on the Assembly speaker. Willie Brown's Teflon™© was weapons grade.

Accused by open-government activists of holding secret lawmaker meetings, Brown admitted to it and essentially told the public, "So what?" I took it a step further with this cartoon and put Brown in Lincoln's place; I figured this is a good week to post it. If he saw the cartoon at all, Brown might have smiled. Plink! See, not a scratch!

Only term limits could defeat Brown, who was the poster child for the term-limit initiative movement. Even then Brown bounced back as mayor of San Francisco, giving The City its very model of swagger and bravado and fedora-capped style. His nickname: Da Mayor.

The state has named the western span of the Bay Bridge — the older stretch that connects The City with Treasure Island — the Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge.

Enough said.

Silly, silly job

As I said in the last post, I love sketches for their liveliness and potential, as in this cartoon draft.

Wandering the desert of What the Hell do I do With the Rest of My Life?, between what I thought was the end of my freelance business and the beginning of what I thought would be a teaching career, I took some odd jobs.

One was in a Boy Scouts of America retail store. That might merit its own post someday, when I figure out just what to show and tell about it.

I think I retained much of the liveliness here, mostly by
reining in my desire to color everything. As for the message:
(shrug). This was the last 'toon I drew for CASBO, the people
in charge having been dismissed. This might have been
their siren song.

Another was Marketing and Communications Specialist for CASBO, which sounds like a clown that rents out to kids' birthday parties but really stands for the California Association of School Business Officials.

It's a trade and lobbying group representing just about everyone else in public education who's not a teacher. Superintendents, their assistants, business officials, accountants, secretaries, maintenance and operations managers, custodians, all fit under this umbrella. Most states have ASBOs, and a national group influences them all.

My job included writing and editing a weekly newsletter … wrestling with rudimentary Website software to shepherd and massage weekly box ads advertising for school business official jobs available statewide … and managing the organization's "library," by which it meant bookstore, by which it meant I would process mail orders for CASBO publications and ship them out.

The first CASBO cartoon I did portrays a universal truth:
Lawmakers, a long time after they've ever stepped foot
inside a classroom, make laws they think will make
schools work better. They don't offer any money to pay
for these great ideas; then they blame schools, teachers
specifically, for when these laws fail the children. Hmmm.

I got to run the bookstore during one of CASBO's conventions. Upside: Half-mile long San Diego Convention Center, Gaslight District, Petco Park, the extensive trolley system and the beautiful San Diego coastline. Downside: I got to run the bookstore during the convention.

Every three months or so I got to have a little fun.

Occasionally, for example, I'd get to write a profile about some CASBO official for the organization's slick quarterly magazine. It had been a long time since using my feature writing muscles, so it was a relief to put two words together in a sentence and feel like I was actually creating something people would read.

I had no problem toeing the company line here. CASBO didn't really represent anything objectionable to me; support for public education is good in most forms. Maybe some of the business officials get disproportionately more than teachers, but the running theme there was, "We're working toward a common goal here."

Charter schools are the answer; everyone says so. So it's
natural they get the resources, right? The strangest sight
is of a charter school nestled within a public school,
running concurrently. What's wrong with this picture?

At least CASBO was honest about its editorial objectives, unlike the California Farm Bureau's newspaper, for which I worked, where the editors pretended we were an actual independent newspaper. 

Many times there I'd dislocate my brain trying to balance a farmer's six-word sentence with a reasoned argument by the loyal opposition.

The most fun I had at CASBO was being able to draw a cartoon for its quarterly magazine. 

It was far from perfect. I was the draftsman for ideas generated by the CASBO executive director and my boss, who was also the magazine editor. With rare exception, they gave me the idea, the cast, the signage requests, and it was up to me to compose it all.

I frequently pushed an idea to certain limits, and the executive director and editor would pull me back in. Several cartoons went many rounds before we could all agree on the final version.

A variation on the theme above …

I didn't mind. The more I got to fuss with the cartoons, the less I had to mess with the job's other drudgeries. I got really mopey the minute I turned in final art for each 'toon, because it meant alphabetizing the CASBO library and feeling my eyeballs dry out.

With each 'toon I played with a different style, trying to be more blunt and immediate than in most of my other work.

These are kinda sorta editorial cartoons, and they beat the drum of a couple of distinct themes: (1) the state won't fund the rising mountain of laws and regulations with which it buries public schools; (2) the state pays more attention to public charter schools rather than solving public school problems; (3) the state government is going to hell in a handbasket; and (4) Arnold Schwarzenegger is a poopy pants.

Schwarzenegger was bad for education. Not that anyone has
really been good for education …

A really big poopy pants. CASBO was not a fan of his leadership. I had to agree.

But lampooning the former governor every three months could not sustain me. I had to get out of that place and applied to teacher school. When I realized teacher school had falsely advertised its program was ideal for full-time workers (right, as long as your boss didn't mind frequent, sometimes lengthy and hastily scheduled days off to work in classrooms!) and had to leave CASBO to take up substitute teaching, I wasn't really all that sad.

I broke the news to my boss. "That's too bad," she said. Pause. "Can you still draw cartoons?"

Really, that was her concern? Oh, screw it, what did I care?! I still got to do the best part of the job.

…really bad for education …

Her boss then admitted my job had been a mashup of a couple of other jobs; they had meant to put more more work into defining the creature they had created, but never got around to it. 

Somehow I kept drawing 'toons while studying — until the two bosses eventually left CASBO — and kept freelance clients even while teaching, so I could revive my business after teaching without a herculean effort.

These are just some of the cartoons I got to draw over that in-between time.

Enjoy over coffee.

… and bad for everything else.

Concept for a California-is-going-to-hell cartoon …

…which became this

CASBO smelled bias …

Stylistically different, conceptually puzzling: This was
simply my CASBO bosses' way of saying, "Can't
we all get along?" I guess.

Hope as a four-letter word

How fascinating is this week's work by World's Best Editorial Cartoonist Pat Oliphant? Let me count the ways:

(Fanboys and girls of editorial cartoons — ye tiny but zealous lot — commence salivation …)

1. It's vintage Pat Oliphant:

Artistically, it's the cartoonist, two or three bottles of ink and a brush, and get outta the way! The result: A maelstrom of lines and squiggles and scribbles and scratches and the blackest blacks and the most delicate and telling of details, gelling into a complex serving of cold gall that few besides Oliphant can pull off.

Politically, it's Oliphant in the dark recess of his citizen heart.

Cynics could say Oliphant, the elder statesman of great cartoonists at 77, simply wanted an excuse to draw the villains of the Golden Age of editorial cartoons; I know it's a trope among several top cartoonists who joke they wish they had Nixon to kick around some more.

But here Oliphant unearths this lot for grave purpose. In fact, I think this cartoon is a personal appeal to President Obama; he's not trying to mess with the minds of the shrinking op-ed reading public; he's trying to mess with the president.

At heart, Oliphant is a patriot who regards his work as duty, ever vigilant to our country's flaws, ever hopeful that we do what we can to mend those flaws.

This cartoon suggests to me that Oliphant is about to give up hope in the president — as I am about to — dismayed that rather than ushering in change and progress and rescue of the Constitution, Obama instead carries on more of the same opaque imperialism he replaced, only moreso.

Oliphant has penned one (last?) wake-up call. Will President Obama see it from Senegal, where he's traveling?

Oliphant has been moving toward this statement for a while. Shortly before calling Obama out as just another crony, he produced this one:

Completely devoid of laugh lines, this cartoon is simply a severe interrogation, questioning President Obama's grasp of his office. It is cold and hard and cutting. Oliphant is fed up.

2. J. Edgar is wearing high heels. An Oliphant never forgets, and never foregoes a chance to pierce with his fiercest stereotypes.

3. It's raw art, no attempt made to erase pencil lines or to scan and Photoshop®™© it for clean clean contrast. It's as if the cartoon missed a step toward reproduction, as if Oliphant or an assistant rushed it to dissemination. It's full of smudges and extraneous pencil lines, reminding me of editorial cartoons I've seen in museum exhibits, warty and coated in Wite-Out™® blobs to hide mistakes from the press; we've been let in to where the wizard works the levers.

•••

So appropos of nothing you'll miss it: Suppose California voters passed a proposition outlawing interracial marriage. You'd be horrified, or should be. But say it passed anyway, and proposition supporters argue (without any proof) that children deserve to be raised by a mom and a dad of the same color, that parents of different races will just not provide the correct upbringing required. Then let's say the governor and the attorney general decide that the proposition, though approved by voters, violates the Constitutional protections for all under the law, and do not support it.

Then say U.S. Supreme Court decides that since the governor and California attorney general will not defend the proposition, there's nothing to decide on and the proposition has no merit. Then say the proposition's supporters decry the Supreme Court's decision, saying the court has taken away our vote. Wouldn't you counter that even though the majority of voters approved the measure, it's still blatant discrimination and violates the Constitution? Wouldn't you? (The answer is yes.)

The same for the Supreme Court's take Wednesday on Proposition 8, which would restrict marriage to between a man and a woman. Now I'm hearing the same arguments, that the high court has taken away our vote. Ah, the essential barely fathomable beauty of our democracy: That just because most people may vote for clear discrimination against those they find different or loathsome, checks and balances protect us from our stupid selves.

Moreso utterly appropos: Why do people take pictures of the foods they're about to eat and post them on facebook, et. al? You could explain it to me, but it won't make any less silly.

Black-and-blue déja vu

Bow before my awesome artistic influence! Bwa ha Ha HA HA HA HAAAAAA!

Or, just indulge me this quarter-century coincidence:

Michael Ramirez, a conservative editorial cartoonist (not one of my favorites, only because he barely budges from his conservative line rather than expose hypocrisy from all sides, as the best do; but a talented illustrator and two-time Pulitzer winner, so there's that), published this cartoon this week to say CBS' "60 Minutes" aided an alleged Obama administration cover-up of the Sept. 11 attack, 2012 on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

(The Obama administration knew the attack was imminent, critics say, and did not avert it, despite early warning. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed in the attack.)

Which means it took 26 years for my trendsetting cartoon (above) to seep out of Ramirez' subconscious and become the cartoon he drew. Or not!

Which also means, were it not for this timely coincidence, you might never have seen my 'toon … because I have no idea what I was referring to.

Exhaustive research suggests the closest match is the bizarre event in which CBS News anchor Dan Rather was supposedly attacked in New York City by a man who repeatedly asked him, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?"

Except for the REM hit the incident inspired, it wouldn't have motivated me to draw a cartoon. More likely it alluded to another CBS News coverup or an embarrassing news blunder. If you've got better research or a better memory, let me know what I was talking about.

Even so, I ask you, who won the graphics battle, me or Ramirez? My bias shows, but I think if you have to write "CBS 'Black Eye' Logo" and draw an arrow to the thing you're describing, Chester Gould/ Dick Tracy style, you've come in second.

BwahahaHaHAHAAHAAA. Ha!